(Undark) – In an era of open data, genome-wide association studies have become entangled with efforts to prove Black inferiority.

Shortly after Abdellaoui announced his withdrawal, he learned that Kirkegaard was scratched from the speaker lineup, and Abdellaoui decided to give the keynote after all. Yet just two years later, Kirkegaard would be back at the ISIR conference podium — a podium that has served as a platform for Kirkegaard and other proponents of the hereditarian hypothesis since long before Abdellaoui’s threatened boycott. Their presence at ISIR, alongside psychologists and geneticists from many of the world’s top research institutions, underscores a complicated reality in this fraught field of study: When it comes to the genetics of intelligence, the line between mainstream and fringe can be hard to pin down, and the work of the former can intertwine with that of the latter in ways that are difficult to disentangle. (Read More)